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The Silver Lining of China’s Lopsided Labor Markethttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/12/silver-lining-chinas-lopsided-labor-market/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/12/silver-lining-chinas-lopsided-labor-market/#commentsFri, 06 Dec 2013 01:43:33 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=166300With scores of recent graduates joining the ranks of Chinese youth competing for a limited number of jobs each year and their willingness to perform factory work diminishing, Bloomberg Businessweek reports on one surprising upside: a narrowing of income inequality:

Given the relative oversupply of college graduates and undersupply of lower-skilled workers in China, blue-collar wages have risen more quickly than white-collar wages for the past four years. Since 2009, professional wages have climbed 12 percent annually, on average. In the same period, average wages in manufacturing, agriculture, and construction have risen 14 percent annually.

The upshot? “All the data show households with humbler jobs and lower incomes enjoying faster income growth than those with fancier jobs and higher incomes,” observe Batson and Gatley. “China’s income inequality has been quietly getting better.” That doesn’t mean, however, that Chinese people perceive a leveling playing field. “Most Chinese people are not concerned about the Gini coefficient [measuring inequality], or the ratio between urban and rural incomes, but rather the gap between the people with connections and people without them.” And there’s no sign that the power of guanxi is waning in China. [Source]

A list of unclaimed positions by an education consultancy revealed how recent scandals have made some career opportunities just too risky to be worthwhile.

Of the 19,538 job openings listed, 204 had not drawn any applicants by Wednesday afternoon, according to Zhonggong Yijiao, a job-training chain consultancy which prepares applicants for workplace exams.

[…]Many of the jobs that drew no candidates were related to financial oversight or the environment, figures showed.

[…]Not surprisingly, most of the unwanted auditing jobs were with the China State Railway Administration. Four months after a suspended death sentence for former Railways Minister Liu Zhijun concluded an industry-wide anti-graft campaign and led to the downgrading of the ministry into a department, applicants still seem skeptical of job prospects in the field. [Source]

An American Nobel Laureate in Economics has lashed out at the “public servant frenzy” prevalent among young people in China, calling it a waste of talent.

Edmund Phelps, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, said that government posts are not designed for young people and that they do not test young people’s capabilities and are a waste of their education, commenting on the growing numbers of young people in China applying to become civil servants.

“We hope to see more bright young men telling their mothers, ‘Mom, I am heading west, south and north to run a company,’” The Beijing News quoted him as saying, as the economist encouraged young people to start businesses away from China’s more prosperous eastern region.

[…]Phelps said the ultimate driving force behind China’s development was innovation. [Source]

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/09/nobel-laureate-slams-chinas-public-servant-frenzy/feed/0Is a College Degree Worthless in Today’s China?http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/09/college-degree-worthless-todays-china/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/09/college-degree-worthless-todays-china/#commentsFri, 06 Sep 2013 04:16:06 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=162476As many Chinese teenagers who passed the notoriously stressful gaokao college entrance exam started their college life this month, a father in Chengdu refused to finance his daughter’s college education, calling the college degree “useless.” From Weijing Zhu at The World of Chinese:

Ling Ling was born in a small village in a rural area, where her parents and relatives and were farmers. Her parents only finished elementary school, and started their own business. They moved the whole family including Ling Ling and her brother to Chengdu five years ago, and bought a storefront as well as an apartment. Tuition money is not the issue, Ling Ling’s father’s objection simply comes from his belief that studying is useless.

For many, the main benefit of having a college degree is to gain a better chance of getting a job and earning good money. However, it is becoming more and more difficult for college graduates to find employment. Even if you do find a job, the monthly salary is only 2,000 to 3,000 RMB. Ling Ling’s father say: “It is almost the same as what a high school graduate earns, not only would [tuition] money be wasted but also four years of time. Not worth it!” [Source]

Ling Ling’s story ignites heated debates among Chinese netizens about the value of a college education. Many agreed with her father, saying that in today’s China, a college is more like a place for entertainment to compensate for the previous 12 years of rigid learning than for knowledge, and that a college degree isn’t the only way leading to a successful career. For example, one netizen XX的读后感 commented: “Colleges and universities in China are very pragmatic. They serve as stepping stones to a good job, not as a place to offer true education.”

[…] Now seems to be the third wave of a general loss of faith in education. And the reason is simple. As China’s expanding colleges and universities generating more and more graduates, the job market is getting worse and worse, especially during an economic slowdown. Take 2013 for instance, a record-high 6.99 million fresh graduates are on the market. But in Beijing, the home of many of the country’s top universities, only 33.6% fresh graduates have signed up for employment as of May 10. [Source]

In 1997, 400,000 students graduated from four-year university programs. Today, Chinese schools produce more than 3 million per year. But employment rates at graduation have plunged. And remote suburbs of Beijing and Shanghai teem with underemployed graduates, crammed four to a room in substandard housing and eking out an existence, often financially supported by their parents, as sidewalk vendors.

[…] In the late 1990s, the authorities launched a crash expansion of higher education as a short-term stimulus package to overcome the effects of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and as a longer-term economic development tool. With the spigot of state funding opened wide, universities expanded dramatically. Leafy campuses sprouted in the outlying districts of major cities. Academic hiring surged. And in just two years—between 1998 and 2000—the entering freshman class doubled from 1 to 2 million.

[…] In response, Chinese authorities are taking stopgap measures. Officials have increased enrollment in domestic master’s programs to absorb a flood of unemployed college graduates. But expanded levels of graduate education have merely disguised and delayed youth unemployment, resulting in media stories such as “Graduate with Master’s Degree in Law Seeks Position as Cafeteria Worker.” [Source]

But for many Chinese students, the education system may not seem worth the investment of money and time that it requires. Chinese educators at both the university and secondary level are searching for solutions to the problems confronting the Chinese education system. As Kathleen McLaughlin reports in the Economist, a new proposal from the Ministry of Education calls for less homework, while also encouraging more hands-on projects and extracurricular activities, as a means to reduce the pressure college-seeking students feel to focus solely on test results. Others are looking to American classrooms as models for reform. Dan Levin at The New York Times:

[…R]uifan, 15, who goes by Derek in the United States, soon discovered that science was more than just facts and formulas meant to be regurgitated on tests.

At school in West Des Moines, Iowa, where he lived with a host family, his science teacher donned protective goggles and used a long-reach lighter to ignite a hydrogen balloon, just so students could get a firsthand look at the element’s explosive properties.

“When American high school students are discussing the latest models of airplanes, satellites and submarines, China’s smartest students are buried in homework and examination papers,” said Ni Minjing a physics teacher who is the director of the Shanghai Education Commission’s basic education department, according to Shanghai Daily, an English-language newspaper. “Students also have few chances to do scientific experiments and exercise independent thinking.” [Source]

Nearly 1,000 incoming freshmen at Michigan State last fall—roughly one in eight new students—were from China. That proportion was made yet more remarkable by this fact: Just six years earlier, fewer than 100 Chinese undergraduates, total, were enrolled here. In 2012, by contrast, more students starting their freshman year called China home than hailed from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin combined. It’s a significant shift at a university that has been called “a big Michigan high school.”

[…] Jianwei had only to look at her roommate to understand her good fortune. She was Chinese, too, but born in the United States, to parents who ran a restaurant in small-town Michigan. Every weekend she drove a couple of hours to work for her parents, to help cover her tuition.

[…] Jianwei’s parents were generous, although not as generous as some. Most of the fancy cars at Michigan State, the Mercedes and BMWs and Land Rovers, were driven by Chinese students. It was said that the local auto dealerships hired Mandarin speakers to cater to these new customers. Some on the campus saw this as a conspicuous display of wealth, and it may have contributed to tensions at the blue-collar institution. The previous summer there had been an ugly incident: Several cars were vandalized, “Go back to China” spray-painted on them in Chinese characters. [Source]

[… R]apid expansion has had disastrous effects. Degree devaluation is one result. When relatively rare in the 1990s, college degrees sufficed to get good jobs. Now a common commodity, they no longer do.

[…] Serious reform requires deep change. Blindly supporting the production of more and more advanced degrees in China for their own sake just doesn’t make sense.

For China, this means re-evaluating state development priorities in place since the late 1990s. These have prioritized university education at the expense of all else. But ironically, unemployment rates for 21-25 year olds in the country are four times lower for elementary school graduates than for university students – precisely because huge demand exists for skilled technical positions that many university graduates are unable (or unwilling) to fill. Rebalancing state priorities to emphasize a diversity of higher education models – postgraduate, university, college and vocational – might help better address looming problems of youth unemployment. Nor are such policies new. They resemble those China pursued in the 1950s or 1980s and in use in Germany today, but abandoned in the frantic rush of the past 15 years to throw up universities with ever more impressive academic credentials. [Source]

If you are a recent college graduate in China and happen to be a “Virgo”, your chances of getting a job may be much less than your “Gemini” or “Pisces” competitors, according to the Liaoning-basedBandao Morning News.

Xu Jingmin, a college graduate and recent victim of such “zodiac discrimination”, said she was disheartened after finding out she matched all the qualifications of a job opening at a travel agency except its requirement for the applicant’s zodiac sign.

“We are looking for Geminis, Libras, and Aquarius,” the ad allegedly said. This means Xu, who is a “Leo,” was disqualified.

Stereotypes are also held against “Virgo” and “Libra” job seekers, who employers believe would be “picky” and jump ship sooner than their peers from other Zodiac signs, according to the report.

[…]In China, nose and eye jobs are among the most popular graduation presents for high-school students who survive the gaokao university entrance examinations. Parents see it as an investment: piano lessons, mathematics tutoring, double eyelid surgery.[…]

[…I]n today’s China, all this is about jobs. Ask the 15 university students who came to the Shanghai Time Plastic Surgery Hospital last month to attend a seminar on physiognomic enhancement. They weren’t warbling on about Ms Peng’s ear lobes or Ms Obama’s upper arms – they were talking salary. [Source]

A record seven million students are expected to graduate from mainland Chinese universities this year, up 2.8 per cent from last year. But with the employment market tightening and competition rising, how are they all going to find jobs?

[…]Let’s examine a few of the reasons why graduates are finding it more difficult to find work. The Chinese economy’s growth is slowing, which would tighten the job market. And often graduate recruitment is the first area to be cut. The Ministry of Education has reported that 15 per cent fewer jobs are on offer for new hires this year than in 2012, according to a survey of 500 leading firms. This causes more competition for the fewer jobs that are available.

[…]Graduates need to maximise their chances of finding work. To do that, they need to consider the following: […] [Source]

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/07/in-todays-tight-job-market-virgos-need-not-apply/feed/0Graduates Face “Hardest Job-Hunting Season” Everhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/06/college-graduates-facing-uphill-battle-for-employment/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/06/college-graduates-facing-uphill-battle-for-employment/#commentsTue, 18 Jun 2013 08:57:05 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=157913A sputtering economy has left China’s seven million college graduates with bleak job prospects, according to Andrew Jacobs and Sue-Lin Wong of The New York Times:

Businesses say they are swamped with job applications but have few positions to offer as economic growth has begun to falter. Twitter-like microblogging sites in China are full of laments from graduates with dim prospects.

The Chinese government is worried, saying that the problem could affect social stability, and it has ordered schools, government agencies and state-owned enterprises to hire more graduates at least temporarily to help relieve joblessness. “The only thing that worries them more than an unemployed low-skilled person is an unemployed educated person,” said Shang-Jin Wei, a Columbia Business School economist.

Lu Mai, the secretary general of the elite, government-backed China Development Research Foundation, acknowledged in a speech this month that less than half of this year’s graduates had found jobs so far. [Source]

This intimidating number is inextricably tied with discussion of another pressing issue: the employment rate of college graduates. The latest statistics released by Beijing Municipal Commission of Education show that only 33.6 percent of college graduates in Beijing have signed employment contracts, up 5 percent from April. Meanwhile, a recent report by Tecent-Mycos reveals that college graduates face gloomy employment prospects.

“I just can’t figure out why it’s so hard to get a job this year,” said Miranda Zhang, who is graduating from a university in Beijing. “I feel desperate –campus recruitment is competitive, with dozens of people competing for one position, while HR offices out in the real world usually disregard graduating students because we do not have any prior work experience.” [Source]

[…]The semi-official Global Timesreports that one of China’s hottest businesses at the moment is the forging of employment contracts for students. Some universities, concerned about the withdrawal of funding due to high unemployment of their grads, will not hand out diplomas before students supply evidence of imminent employment. The fake contracts, of course, inflate the statistics reported to—and eventually the figures issued by—central educational authorities. [Source]

Still, the problem may reach beyond slow economic growth. Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz visited a job fair in Shanghai, where HR managers look for college graduates to fill entry-level positions across a wide-range of industries, and observed that “neither group is interested in each other:”

Nicole Li is looking to hire college graduates for her property management company. “We need technicians to fix software problems, but college grads don’t have these skills,” says Li, frowning. “We need people for exhibitions who can do presentations in English, but they can’t do that, either.”

Li needs to hire people for 60 high-skilled jobs. She says among the thousands of candidates here today, she’ll be lucky if she finds one.

Tong Huiqin comes to this job fair every Friday. He graduated from the Shanghai Finance University six years ago. Since then, he’s jumped from one job to the next. “It isn’t hard to find a job,” says Tong. “It’s hard to find the right job.”

He’s worked as a supervisor for a bunch of companies, but hasn’t found the right fit. “You could have five hundred graduates and five hundred job openings here, and none of them would match up,” he says. [Source]

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/06/college-graduates-facing-uphill-battle-for-employment/feed/0Crunchtime for China’s High School Seniorshttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/06/crunchtime-for-chinas-high-school-seniors/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/06/crunchtime-for-chinas-high-school-seniors/#commentsWed, 05 Jun 2013 05:54:06 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=157051As bilateral talks between U.S President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping are scheduled to take place at Sunnylands, California on Friday, millions of high school seniors in China will sit for a two-day-long National Higher Education Entrance Exam, or gaokao. Dealbook’s Bill Bishop reports:

On those two days, high school seniors from around China will sit for the annual college entrance examination, called the Gaokao in Chinese. Most Chinese students prepare for years under intense pressure, and families spend huge amounts on tutoring and after-school study sessions. While increasing numbers of Chinese students go overseas for college – nearly 200,000 went to North America for the 2011-12 academic year – the vast majority have no option for higher education but to do well on the national exam. [Source]

Raphael didn’t have to tell his parents his score. His father retrieved it online the day scores were released in late June 2011. For a student at one of Beijing’s top high schools, his score was very disappointing. Worse, he had flopped the science section—because he budgeted time poorly, he says, not because he didn’t know the answers. His only option was to enroll at a far-flung university in northeastern China, with little chance of getting back to a job in Beijing, where his parents live and where he had, until then, imagined his future.

[…] The awareness of how much his family is spending on his college education—financial aid is generally not available to overseas students—has changed his perception of what he should do next. “I have to make my education pay off,” he says. Instead of aiming for a job in Beijing, he’s now hoping to work in Silicon Valley. He’s been following the news about visa-policy debates in the U.S. and thinks his decision to pursue a degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) helps his chances to get a green card. Eventually, he hopes to help his family apply for residency in the U.S. “My No. 1 goal is to do better in life than my father,” he says. “My father brought the family to Beijing, and I will bring the family to America.” [Source]

Wages have been steadily rising for China’s 260 million migrant workers—who take jobs in factories, on construction sites, in restaurants, and in other sectors with minimal entry requirements. According to the government-led All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the average monthly earnings of migrant workers across China rose 11 percent from 2011 to 2012, to 2,290 renminbi ($370). That exceeds the rate of China’s GDP growth [but represents almost a 45% slow-down compared with the previous year’s growth] .

[…] Among those new graduates who did find employment last year, 69 percent had starting salaries that paid less than 2,000 renminbi per month—in other words, their jobs paid them less than they might have earned as migrant laborers, according to figures reported by a the21st Century Business Herald newspaper on Tuesday. [Source]

While many countries lament their soaring college dropout rates, China may have just the opposite problem: Too many people finishing university. Some chalk this up to the success of China’s rigorous college entrance exam and family support systems. But others say the country’s universities have become too easy and are producing a glut of graduates that are saturating an already dismal job market.

[…] In 2011, the Beijing-based Mycos Institute released a study showing that only 3 percent of China’s university students drop out [compared with 54% in the U.S., 32% in the U.K., and 11% in Japan]. The Ministry of Education immediately refuted that “high rate” saying the true proportion was just 0.75 percent.

[…] An American teacher, who spoke on the condition he and his school not be named, taught at a well-known public university in Beijing from 2010 to 2011. When he tried to fail a student who never came to class once the entire semester and then skipped the final exam, he was rebuked by a higher-up. “The director basically gave me an ‘either you do it or we will do it’ type answer,” the teacher said. “I was also told to pass on this information to other teachers with the explanation that it got more confusing if we failed a student. In fact, if a student failed another teacher’s class, and that teacher refused to change [the grade], they had another teacher change it. I had to do this multiple times. We would have a make-up test (usually five minutes) and I would give them a grade.”

Wu Yiebing has been going down coal shafts practically every workday of his life, wrestling an electric drill for $500 a month in the choking dust of claustrophobic tunnels, with one goal in mind: paying for his daughter’s education.

His wife, Cao Weiping, toils from dawn to sunset in orchards every day during apple season in May and June. She earns $12 a day tying little plastic bags one at a time around 3,000 young apples on trees, to protect them from insects. The rest of the year she works as a substitute store clerk, earning several dollars a day, all going toward their daughter’s education.

[…] Her parents’ sacrifices to educate their daughter explain how the country has managed to leap far ahead of the United States in producing college graduates over the last decade, with eight million Chinese now getting degrees annually from universities and community colleges.

But high education costs coincide with slower growth of the Chinese economy and surging unemployment among recent college graduates. Whether young people like Ms. Wu find jobs on graduation that allow them to earn a living, much less support their parents, could test China’s ability to maintain rapid economic growth and preserve political and social stability in the years ahead.

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/02/in-china-betting-it-all-on-a-child-in-college/feed/0Chinese Graduates Say No Thanks to Factory Jobshttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/01/chinese-graduates-say-no-thanks-to-factory-jobs/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/01/chinese-graduates-say-no-thanks-to-factory-jobs/#commentsFri, 25 Jan 2013 18:52:11 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=150571China now produces eight million new college graduates each year, four times as many as ten years ago. The job market, however, has not adjusted accordingly. While the graduate glut sharpens competition for white collar jobs even as it drives down wages, the educated unemployed are put off plentiful factory jobs by heightened expectations, lack of prestige, and fear of damage to long-term career prospects. The resulting frustration may prove a long-term challenge to social stability, writes Keith Bradsher at The New York Times:

Wang Zengsong is desperate for a steady job. He has been unemployed for most of the three years since he graduated from a community college here after growing up on a rice farm. Mr. Wang, 25, has worked only several months at a time in low-paying jobs, once as a shopping mall guard, another time as a restaurant waiter and most recently as an office building security guard.

[…] “I have never and will never consider a factory job — what’s the point of sitting there hour after hour, doing repetitive work?” he asked.

Millions of recent college graduates in China like Mr. Wang are asking the same question. A result is an anomaly: Jobs go begging in factories while many educated young workers are unemployed or underemployed. A national survey of urban residents, released this winter by a Chinese university, showed that among people in their early 20s, those with a college degree were four times as likely to be unemployed as those with only an elementary school education.

You know, China’s an enormous country with a lot of regional variations. But one economist based in Tsinghua University, Patrick Chovanec, says that in some areas, he thinks that growth for the whole year might only be 4 to 5 percent; that in fact, these official numbers don’t reflect the extent of the slowdown.

The anonymous BBS forum post below describes a sharp decline in on-campus recruiting at Nankai University in Tianjin, a coastal city not far from Beijing. It compounds Chovanec’s concern, adding that the media have remained upbeat in order to smooth the path for “The Meeting” (last week’s 18th Party Congress). The post seems to no longer be available on NewSMTH.net (水木社区), where it first appeared. But if the censors decided it painted to bleak a picture, then it has years of post-graduation struggle to erase:

On November 7, a report on the employment situation from the Nankai University Employment Counseling Center circulated online. The report shows that Nankai graduates are facing very serious difficulties finding jobs this year. Netizens speculate that college graduates across the nation are also facing formidable challenges.

This year’s employment situation is unusually grim in that:

(1) The number of employers recruiting on campus has decreased by more than 40% compared with this time last year. The number of employers that have reserved space for on-campus recruitment in November and December has also declined sharply compared to previous years.

(2) In previous years, several non-local talent-hunting fairs would organize employers to come to our school and other universities for recruitment. More than a hundred employers would eagerly sign up. But this year, it is generally difficult to find just ten employers to participate.

(3) We learned through communication with some conglomerates that many viable enterprises are recruiting less because they face mergers and reorganization. For example, ZTE used to easily make dozens of job offers at our school, but made only three this year.

Because of The Meeting and other reasons, the media haven’t reported too negatively on the situations of the economy and employment this year. But just as the Employment Counseling Center has seen, the reality is the worst in the last eight years. Even during the financial crisis of 2008-2009, we did not experience such an impact.

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/11/grads-face-tough-job-market/feed/1China’s Army of Graduates Is Strugglinghttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/12/china%e2%80%99s-army-of-graduates-is-struggling/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/12/china%e2%80%99s-army-of-graduates-is-struggling/#commentsSun, 12 Dec 2010 06:24:17 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=116269The New York Times reportson China’s so-called Ant Tribes, or recent graduates who are struggling to get by:

Often the first from their families to finish even high school, ambitious graduates like Ms. Liu are part of an unprecedented wave of young people all around China who were supposed to move the country’s labor-dependent economy toward a white-collar future. In 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then the president, announced plans to bolster higher education, Chinese universities and colleges produced 830,000 graduates a year. Last May, that number was more than six million and rising.

It is a remarkable achievement, yet for a government fixated on stability such figures are also a cause for concern. The economy, despite its robust growth, does not generate enough good professional jobs to absorb the influx of highly educated young adults. And many of them bear the inflated expectations of their parents, who emptied their bank accounts to buy them the good life that a higher education is presumed to guarantee.

“College essentially provided them with nothing,” said Zhang Ming, a political scientist and vocal critic of China’s education system. “For many young graduates, it’s all about survival. If there was ever an economic crisis, they could be a source of instability.”

For Miss Liu, the daughter of poor farmers, a degree was to be her passport out of a life of poverty, a way to escape working in the fields, or toiling as a humble migrant worker in a far-off factory in southern China.

But her dream of making the huge leap from farm girl to college graduate will never become reality. Deeply depressed and ashamed about her failure to find a job to take up when she graduated, and consumed with guilt about the financial sacrifices her family had made for her, Miss Liu brought her studies and her life to a premature end by drowning herself in a ditch full of freezing, filthy water.

[…] Miss Liu’s reaction to her predicament was extreme, but not unusual. In April, a report by the Shanghai Education Commission listed suicide as the leading cause of death among students. And with one in three of this year’s graduates unable to get a job, according to education ministry figures released last week, Miss Liu’s anxiety about finding work is shared by most students.